Artificial intelligence can add value to the e-commerce customer experience, including content creation, product discovery and personalisation, according to an agency expert.

“So far, the key focus of AI use has been to help deliver a more personalised experience for shoppers online, says Khaled Matar, Associate Director – E-Commerce at PHD Singapore.

“However, the technology is increasingly being deployed to impact other areas of e-commerce now, such as content creation, search innovation and targeting consumers with a likelihood to purchase,” he writes in an exclusive article for WARC. (For more, read the article in full here: The growing applications of artificial intelligence in e-commerce.)

Artificial intelligence is particularly useful in the drive for personalisation, Matar believes. Retailers that have implemented personalisation strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Matar cites outdoor apparel company North Face as one company getting it right. North Face partnered with IBM’s Watson to personalise its online shopping experience by implementing artificial intelligence.

“IBM’s Watson creates a psychoanalytic profile of customer data in less than a second, followed by questions about where, when, and for what activities customers will be using their apparel. Next, the AI provides personalised suggestions, ranked from ‘High Match’ to ‘Low Match’. This creates a much more optimised experience for shoppers who do not have to scroll through thousands of items to find the right one,” he explains.

Creating relevant content for thousands of products requires time and budget from businesses. AI is now helping resolve this by automating the content creation process, particularly in China. Alibaba recently unveiled an AI tool that can produce up to 20,000 lines of content a second, allowing people to focus more energy on “richly creative work” such as video or infographics.

“This allows merchants on Tmall and Taobao to generate product information without the need for human intervention,” Matar writes.